Given the Cabinet clear-out and the style of Boris and – crucially – his team, this feels more like the start of the Coalition in 2010 than the start of Theresa May’s government in 2016.

Also, whereas Theresa May (again, and her team) was notoriously anti-social media at the Home Office, and didn’t seem to thaw a huge amount in Downing Street, with people like Dominic Cummings and Grant Shapps involved, there’s appetite for digital. Just not the kind that Whitehall has really done before – and that could be a potential battleground between political advisors and government communicators.

Less wisdom-of-crowds, more get-out-the-vote

The early days of the Coalition seemed like a golden age of digital engagement, with schemes like the Red Tape Challenge and Your Freedom using crowdsourcing and commenting to get ideas from the public – though not with amazing results.

If profiles of Shapps and Cummings are to be believed – and given the political challenges of Brexit and post-Brexit persuading and directing opinion rather than engaging with it – there will be pressure to focus digital comms more tightly on what mobilises the right groups to take the desired actions. Yes, Grant Shapps gets media kudos for basically using spreadsheets – but scoff ye not. He believes in gathering and applying data to simple tools like online ads and email campaigns in a way civil service comms (and even political comms) rarely does. And he consistently comes out on top when up against those with loftier strategies or more elaborate digital tools.

Boris unleashed

Not sure about this one. I was hearing Tim Montgomerie on the radio earlier suggesting that Boris’ own social media profiles over the last few months felt like they had been taken over by speech writers. Grant Shapps suggested Boris may be a more liberal, progressive Tory than he gets credit for in the media. If Donald Trump is a guide to anything, it’s that (shall we say) the cut and thrust of Twitter engagement can continue personally even if you have the top job – you don’t have to outsource your social media voice.

We know Boris is a colourful creative writer, and feels that his media coverage is unfairly negative. Perhaps we’ll see more first person “-Boris” signed tweets in the coming months, as his team tries to redress the balance. But after bus-gate, maybe not a Reddit AMA.

Facebook strategies over animated Twitter videos

With referendum winners from Vote Leave packed around the Cabinet table now, it’s likely that civil service digital comms teams will need to have smarter Facebook strategies than before, including paid-for targeting, A/B campaign testing and potentially engagement with influential community groups.

And so it begins. The Conservatives welcome the new PM by pumping Facebook full of Boris Johnson ads. They're running an astonishing 554 versions of these things. Almost as if they're gathering data for an election… pic.twitter.com/HNq9SAophN

I’m anticipating that it will be beginning of the end for tepid animated Twitter videos, pushing tepid policies during the weird vacuum of the last few months. If the political advisors are as savvy as they are portrayed to be, your digital comms deliverables as a civil servant will be less about the URL and more about the ad creative and the engagement rates.

Insight-driven comms, changing hearts rather than minds

If there’s an area where a more red-blooded digital comms approach potentially slots well into civil service comms, it’s using insight to drive activity. Government comms has often defaulted (with honourable exceptions) to explaining issues and presenting rational arguments under the banner of raising awareness. But decades of marketing research points to actual behaviour change usually being driven by other factors.

When the political stakes are high, as they are now, it seems likely that civil service comms will be pushed to justify itself to show actual results and changes in the things audiences do, not just eyeballs exposed to it.

But the flip side to the scrutiny and expectations may be a bolder appetite to spend and more senior interest in digital strategy. Interesting times.

]]>How to make “working out loud” workhttps://postbureaucrat.com/2019/07/11/how-to-make-working-out-loud-work/
Thu, 11 Jul 2019 15:16:03 +0000https://postbureaucrat.com/?p=3203A tweet from Dave reminded me how hard it is to actually work out loud.

For a start, you need the time to write something for yourself which nobody is probably asking for, unless you’re in a very enlightened workplace.

Next, you need to be able to talk about what you’re doing. That’s tough if it’s client work or controversial subjects or you live in a land of FOI or hostile online media (or you have hostile press office colleagues).

And then you worry about making it interesting or understandable for others to read. A lot of people worry about this, and I think they shouldn’t. I try not to.

A lot of the ‘working out loud’ I see blogged or tweeted isn’t all that interesting. There are some fine weeknoters, for sure, but there’s a lot of case studies wrapped up as working out loud, or thinly-veiled self-promotion, and frankly life’s too short for that. We’ll all be queuing for tomatoes by Christmas, so let’s at least be honest about what’s working and what’s not in our day jobs.

Journeys over destinations, honesty over happytalk

The posts I enjoy are the ones that describe what someone’s tried, what went wrong and what they did next. The least useful ones skip to the happy end result or imply like getting there was easy. Even if it was, hearing about your pain makes me feel better about my own. If you’re not allowed to tell a warts and all story (without breaching confidences, natch) then you’re not really being allowed to work out loud.

Building blocks and stepping stones

Linked to that, the best posts give away ideas or code or templates or something I can use for myself. Musings are fine, but if there’s something you can offer to give others a leg-up or a shortcut, that’s better.

It’s not them, it’s you

The most important audience for blogging isn’t the people reading, it’s the person writing.

Working out loud involves reflecting, and thinking and trying to make sense of something. So by all means explain and be helpful, but above all remember working out loud and writing it down is helping the future you. It it helps the present others, that’s a bonus.

So in the hierarchy of “working out loud”:

Perfectly OK = where you started from, what you’ve tried, frustrations, feelings
Even better = how you did it, what you’ve learned, what you’d do differently
Amazingly best = how people can adapt what you’ve done

]]>As a foodie, I have too many recipe books I never use…https://postbureaucrat.com/2019/06/30/as-a-foodie-i-have-too-many-recipe-books-i-never-use/
https://postbureaucrat.com/2019/06/30/as-a-foodie-i-have-too-many-recipe-books-i-never-use/#commentsSun, 30 Jun 2019 22:14:11 +0000https://postbureaucrat.com/?p=3206Chez Gray, we’re into our cooking. Not like crazy obsessive, but we’ve always enjoyed making interesting food. So over time, we’ve accumulated quite a lot of recipe books – over 80, actually. But despite them being to hand, and full of interesting recipes, we found we weren’t using them much. Some sat on the shelf, unloved, year after year.

We worked on solving the ‘where to go holiday?’ problem with TripRandomiser about 18 months ago, and that gave us a bit of a taste for decision-making based on chance.

So, not long after that, I set up The Foodomiser, and we’ve been using it as a family on and off ever since. In a nutshell, the idea is:

We set up a simple database of our recipe books (originally we did this via a barcode-scanning app we found on an app store. It sort of worked, but frankly we found manual entry is more reliable and easier). This then feeds a tiny app I made to put all the pages in all the books end-to-end, and pick one at random (so bigger books stand a bigger chance of getting picked)

We added The Foodomiser web app shortcut to our phones’ home screen and use the app from time to time to pick a random page from a random book in our library

We then hunt through our shelves looking for the corresponding book, and decide if it’s a viable recipe (see ‘red lines’ below). If so, we note down the book/page.

So, you make whatever it says?

Kind of. The first rule of The Foodomiser is: there are no rules. But we’ve adopted a few practical principles:

If the page isn’t a viable recipe (it’s a picture, or some waffle-y intro) then you spin again

If the recipe has ingredients some/most of the family are allergic to or hate, you spin again

If a recipe book keeps turning up recipes that frankly don’t spark joy, then delete it from the library and Marie Kondo-it out of your life: give the book to a charity shop. Bonus: while you’re in the charity shop, see if you can find a replacement!

Keep spinning a few times to get a batch of recipes to get a balanced diet (some main courses and puddings) and make them over time

Not everyone has to know they’ll like it, in order for you to make it. It just has to be interesting/viable, given we’re a family with two small, fussy boys and busy lifestyles

We’ve had some real dark horses emerge (home made pumpernickel was actually great), a few popular classics (home made jam donuts) and some repertoire-expanding creations (fresh pasta).

Above all, it’s got us using our recipe books again, clearing out some of the less exciting ones we’ve had cluttering up the house for 20 years, and making more interesting meals. Foodomiser spins are a social activity, and quite an entertaining way to decide what to cook (will it be chocolate cake or seaweed salad? Drumroll…)

Feel free to pop some of your own books into The Foodomiser and set one up for yourself. Let me know how you get on!

]]>https://postbureaucrat.com/2019/06/30/as-a-foodie-i-have-too-many-recipe-books-i-never-use/feed/2Being no-nonsense in a nonsense worldhttps://postbureaucrat.com/2019/04/26/being-no-nonsense-in-a-nonsense-world/
Fri, 26 Apr 2019 06:00:23 +0000https://postbureaucrat.com/?p=3193Like a lot of people, I ldentify strongly with the idea of no-nonsense. Being practical, and down to earth and rooted in experience and hard work. Not pretending to be what you’re not.

When I started a business, I used ‘for people with more sense than money’ as strapline, which seemed to resonate. But a year or two ago, we decided to change it, to something that talked more about the change we wanted to make happen as a team, than just our earthy good value.

These days, we’re as likely to find ourselves in an American chrome-and-glass corporate boardroom with management consultants as we are building a government website or training Whitehall press officers. Down-to-earth British modesty has its place, but we want to see a change in the world, and that takes self-confidence and a bit of guile at times.

We’re focussed on helping people engage positively and honestly online. We find ourselves working with people whose organisations have a dark past expropriating people from their land and manipulating markets to favour the wealthy – and that’s just the civil servants. The same week we’re helping climate scientists publish their research, more than a couple of our clients have seen protestors glued to their chrome-and-glass doorways. There’s sometimes a touch of Milo Minderbinder to it all, and I momentarily wonder where the no-nonsense ideal went. Even if the money isn’t the be all and end all, it’s harder than you think to draw your red lines unless you’re willing to be pretty arbitrary.

Still, I’m not too worried about my own integrity. Being no-nonsense for me is about honesty with each other about what we’re offering and frankness with clients about how they’re doing as individuals and teams. Bad corporate behaviour stems from anxiety and fear from the people who work in them. As consultants, we earn the right to be frank and encourage honesty by being constructive, assertive and effective. We get to that point by showing respect – while never becoming dependent.

This week has been under a bit of a shadow for me, after seeing the sad news that long time Govcamp friend and collaborator Rupert Bowater died at the weekend. He’d been ill, but was full of his manic enthusiasm when I last saw him in our office a couple of months ago.

Rupert was the sort of person that naturally comes to mind when I think of ‘no-nonsense’. He was acerbically rude about procurement teams and self-important bureaucracy, luddite stakeholders and Agile cargo-cultists. He had every right to be: the firm he and Paul founded in the 1980s was lean and agile, dedicated to open source and working in the open long before people made laptop stickers about those things. Rupert was a regular at Govcamps and organised meet-ups of his own – proper grassroots digital things, open to anyone, talking about practical stuff.

He was enormously kind to me when I started out, and our teams worked together on a few fun projects over the last few years, with that no-nonsense frankness in common between us. The Helpful crew has all been on non-violent communication training to handle the frustration of dealing with ‘nonsense’; I reckon we should have snuck Rupert in with us, for his own good.

I noticed that Rupert must have updated his Twitter bio recently, to add the line from the song: enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think. I’ll be in a pub tonight with a warm beer, worrying about my red lines, trying to take Rupert’s advice.

]]>Long haulhttps://postbureaucrat.com/2019/03/21/long-haul/
Thu, 21 Mar 2019 22:23:55 +0000https://postbureaucrat.com/?p=3182I don’t tend to feel I can write much here about the other side of what I’ve been doing these past nine years – our crisis simulation work. But here’s a little flight of fancy into what simulating social media crises has to do with planes. Or something.

Our first commercial exercise eight years ago was at a major London airport with 747s trundling past the window. Since then we’ve worked for the people who make planes, the airlines that fly them and the airports they fly to around the world. The annals of crisis communication and social customer care theory are packed with aviation examples.

It’s in the memories of flights to places I probably wouldn’t have seen and experiences I wouldn’t have had. Whale watching in British Columbia. Glaciers in Alaska. Sundown cocktails in Singapore. Giraffe watching in Nairobi. Ramadan heat in Dubai. Ice cream in Milan. Memorable trips with colleagues.

Somehow it feels even more profoundly connected in terms of the Simulator and exercising itself. Our roleplay cockpit full of intimidating switches and robo-tweeting autopilot. The briefings and debriefs, and scripts like flight plans we try to but don’t always quite follow. The frisson and elegance and G-forces of an exercise taking off. Island-hopping ninety-minute workshops in a metaphorical Cessna; A380 superjumbo three-day exercises with a crew of ten roleplayers dishing out the drinks in the cabin.

There’s sometimes tedious prep work and hanging around, fishing laptops in and out of bags at security scanners, the memorable and sometimes awkward passengers who fly on our exercises, voluntarily locked in to an uncomfortable, sometimes white-knuckle ride with us for three hours or more.

Unlike a normal digital product, the scope to fix things while airborne is limited. We have checklists and safety features and a seasoned crew on the flight deck, but there’s always the risk of something going dramatically – but thankfully never fatally – wrong.

Here’s to more (carbon offset) takeoffs and landings. It’s been a pleasant flight so far.

]]>It’s OK to reinvent the wheelhttps://postbureaucrat.com/2019/01/14/its-ok-to-reinvent-the-wheel/
Mon, 14 Jan 2019 09:20:28 +0000https://postbureaucrat.com/?p=3172I was on one of those slightly soul-crushing conference calls last week. On the surface, it was pretty enthusiastic and efficient. But then someone uttered the fatal words, to general agreement:

“What’s important here is that we avoid duplication”

I’ve always had a nagging problem when people have expressed this and its variants: Don’t reinvent the wheel. Who’s already done this? We need to focus our effort.

I mean, I’m all for efficiency. And it makes sense to link up with others doing similar work and collaborate. Where you see tight budgets and feel overloaded, it’s frustrating to see things being done twice when once would be enough.

My problem really is with ‘enough’, and whether we critically evaluate that when we cheerfully agree that duplication is a bad thing. I’m not sure if this is just painfully naïve macroeconomics 101 or whether intelligent people otherwise forget what actually drives successful outcomes. But here’s some reasons why duplication can be a good thing:

A better wheel

When different teams are working on the problem, you often get a better outcome, if a few other conditions are in place. As long as the teams can see each others’ work, and their customers can put pressure on them to add feature X or cut feature Y, then you get the benefit of different brains applied to a shared problem, working from different perspectives. Agile as a methodology has plenty of duplication built in (“you build an alpha and throw it away?”) in the service of an end result that adapts to change and feedback.

Pressure on wheelwrights

The space race in the 1960s and 1970s. Britpop in the 1990s. Ridesharing. Smartphones. Web Search. All moved at the pace they did because of competition between a few key teams, who felt the psychological and leadership pressure of others trying to beat them to fame, riches and acclaim. Things move slower and with less user focus when that duplication is absent or weaker. Hello, Microsoft.

Resilience

Sure, it’s duplication to have more than one team or supplier but there are all kinds of reasons why a team or person can go off the rails. A bad takeover or manager, a strategic error, a natural disaster. To avoid keeping your eggs in one basket, there need to be duplicate baskets.

Training wheelwrights

People and organisations need to learn. My conference call was talking about user generated content, which is perhaps the epitome of a situation where duplication is welcome: you want more ideas from more people, with the best upvoted and rewarded. The contributors learn what gets likes, hone their craft, and get better with each contribution.

I guess I’m making a case here for competition, more than duplication per se (though competition within big bureaucracy is almost as unpopular, and wrongly so). For duplication to be positive, you need to have some other elements in place:

Comparability

You need to know what other people are doing, simply put. Large organisations are breeding grounds for teams doing things in isolation with little visibility or communication – and when they’re exposed, the instinct is to hide or be merged, not to compete constructively.

Accountability

Parallel competing teams in a big bureaucracy sounds like a recipe for disaster, for sure. This can’t be an all-consuming race to be the best. The competitors need tight budgets, frank feedback and tough expectations. When ideas don’t work, they need to be killed off quickly and effort put into other things.

]]>Blogging as thinkinghttps://postbureaucrat.com/2018/12/31/blogging-as-thinking/
Mon, 31 Dec 2018 11:54:08 +0000https://postbureaucrat.com/?p=31632008-9 was a good time for me. I was a few months into an amazing new job thinking about how a government department might use social media creatively for communications and policymaking; and in the early months too of being a new dad. Work-wise, our little team did some amazing things that year, from low cost engagement with online communities to launching multi-layereddigital consultations with a launch video made in-house featuring proper A-list science celebs. Bonkers.

And while output isn’t everything, it was good times on this blog too: 55 posts during 2019 apparently, or more than one a week. And so many comments! Bless us all, and our self-published ‘zines.

My day-to-day is different now, and I realise what I really miss about that 2009-era blogging isn’t just the heartwarming comments but also the process of reflection it encouraged me to go through, as I wrote up projects, presentations and ideas. There’s enormous value in forcing yourself to write things up, straightening out your own contradictions with extra Googling, and putting your pride or frustration into words that you can say out loud as a reasonable person. Going back over the last decade of posts as I’ve tidied up this blog recently, reminded me that for every post that feels toecurlingly embarrassing or dated now (Ning communities!) there’s one that still rings true, or that reminds me what I care about.

These days my own focus and scale is a bit different – but let’s not get carried away: I’m still cranking out websites for public sector projects, and pondering how to stimulate positive engagement online amongst people in large corporate hierarchies. People ask me to contribute content to a schedule to fit company marketing plans, and that’s fine, but it’s not the same as the published evolution of thinking that Giles talks about, and that I used to publish here. I feel busy now, but I’m not sure what my 2009 self would make of it, as it looks like he got plenty done and still managed to reflect on what he was learning.

So, ten years on, a resolution. I’m going to use this blog more next year not particularly to build an audience or count the engagement, but for my own reflection. The themes might change a bit from the heady buzz and tools of 2009, but that’s fine. And there’s still an RSS feed here for the taking, to plug into your Netvibes or iGoogle dashboard of choice.

We’re off almost as far north as the Triprandomiser can take us, starting from the island capital of Orkney, Kirkwall, and (hopefully) finding our way home. Beyond the first night and a vague plan to play Britain’s most northerly mini golf course, we’re in the lap of the gods.

]]>How to be a Very Stable Geniushttps://postbureaucrat.com/2018/01/18/how-to-be-a-very-stable-genius/
Thu, 18 Jan 2018 08:21:11 +0000https://postbureaucrat.com/?p=3071I’ve not pitched a session at UKGovcamp for a few years, but I’m hoping to pitch one this year on something that’s been troubling me for a while. How does social media and digital culture affect our state of mind, and what can we practically do about it?

A note of clarification on the title: I’m not claiming Trump-like smartness here. But in some ways, he’s emblematic of the shift I’ve seen in social media globally from the friendly club it was in the era when Govcamping was born to… well, something a bit darker and more complicated, about tribes and tweetstorms, the sharing of #blessed lives and the retreat into private accounts and spaces where h8ters, future employers and our families won’t find us.

More embarrassing to admit, I’m regularly frustrated with myself at losing useful time, sleep and positive focus winding myself up about the fun others seem to be having. And as my kids (and parents) get more addicted to their screens, I still don’t feel I have the strategies to help them get the etiquette right and protect their own state of mind. As 2018 kicks off, I’ve seen a few frustrated friends decide to take a break from social media altogether.

That’s a shame. I’m still a militant optimist, and I’ve seen the tools do good for me and the world around me. So I’d like to have a session to share challenges and solutions around:

how do we make social media and digital tools more generally a constructive part of a life well lived, and maintain our perspective, our generosity and our good temper?

how do we stay productive in a world of notifications, interruptions and feeds?

how have people helped their colleagues and loved ones (not that they are mutually exclusive – I won’t judge…) to build social media into their personal or professional lives in ways which help them be more cheerful, curious and kind?

If you’d like to join in, please do! And if you’re not at UKGovcamp but have a story or idea to share, please let me know.

]]>The Traindomiser: a train adventurehttps://postbureaucrat.com/2017/10/26/the-traindomiser-a-train-adventure/
Thu, 26 Oct 2017 13:41:08 +0000https://postbureaucrat.com/?p=3062We were having a family chat over breakfast one Sunday morning about the kind of holidays we enjoy:

As it’s a truth commonly acknowledged that a chap in possession of a weekend must be in need of a coding project, my son Arthur and I set to work to come up with something that might tick these boxes. We were aiming for something that might help us go on a train adventure this half term through the UK, exploring (non-bleak, possibly seaside) places we’ve not been to before and staying wherever Airbnb or Booking.com might find for us that night.

The result is: The Traindomiser (Update: now Triprandomiser). We found a list of UK towns and cities, and explored the excellent Transport API which provides free access to all kinds of things, from bus routes to train fares, and – most useful for our purposes – helps map a place to a nearby station. We coded up a randomising algorithm that will take a maximum distance you want to travel, and suggest a place to suit, along with the train route to get there from a nearby station. We learned how mobile devices can request your location and pass it to a form, fiddled around with the search results URLs for Airbnb and Booking.com, and added a bit of suspense with some animation of the results. We learned to curse Javascript until a StackOverflow answer emerged, an important skill for any coder.

We’ve been preparing for our inaugural Traindomiser trip this week. We’ve got our Family & Friends railcard and a vintage map of the rail network (sadly out of print now). We’re travelling light, and seeing how things go. The goal: get to where the Traindomiser picks for us each evening of the trip, assuming we can find a place to stay while on our way. We’ll stop off at the interesting points on the journey, recognising that exciting adventures can come from unexpected places when you’re small. (Hopefully nowhere too bleak.)

We’ve built a little travel blog to track our first adventure with the app, and we’ll post updates there from our trip. And hope the Traindomiser can get us back home before school starts on Monday…